On The Bench!

It's finished!!!!!

The egg cup that my husband challenged me to make for his birthday/Christmas is complete!  I don't normally take THIS long to finish a piece but with working on shows and commission pieces, I'm afraid this had to be worked on in my "spare" (!) time.  

I really enjoyed this process, learning new techniques that I can transfer to my jewellery and seeing how much work goes into a piece like this. If we think back to a time, many many moons ago, where pretty much everything was made by hand, those silversmiths have my utmost respect.

Here are the photos from start......

A disc of fine silver being hollowed by numerous strikes of a wooden hammer

Here we are shallow dish shape......

Doesn't quite look like en egg cup yet....

Getting there.....

I've ruined it! Only joking, new technique called raising which brings up the sides to close up the top to hold the egg.  Does NOT look good at this point!

Using a metal stake to strike against......

Using a different type of hammer for this part.  All those tiny dimples on the silver are created by the strikes of this hammer......

Now that looks like it could hold an egg!

And now a maths lesson! I decided on a cone shaped base for the egg cup to sit on so this was how I worked out the dimensions....

....to finish! TA DA!!!!  I left the texture left by all those thousands of hammer strikes as I love the effect on the cup and kept the base plain as a contrast, polishing the outside and giving the inside a matt finish.

Will I ever make an egg cup again? Unlikely, but never say never!  I will definitely be using the techniques I've learnt to create new pieces of jewellery though.

Hope he likes it :-)

On The Bench!

The challenge set by my husband continues!  (Click here to read last weeks blog about this if you have no idea what I'm on about!)

The technique I used last week to get to the this.......

.....is called hollowing or sinking.....hammering in a circular pattern from the centre and moving outwards, causing the silver to sink down.

To bring those edges up further and go from a dish to and egg cup, I needed to learn anther technique called raising.  This is the opposite to sinking although it looks like you're doing the exact same thing!  Raising brings up the sides by hammering the outside this time and forming it on a stake.  Hollowing, or sinking, was done with a wooden pear shaped hammer, raising is done with a metal hammer with a rectangular face with rounded edges.

It's not easy holding something this small!  I really enjoyed this part, it happens so quickly. It looks like I've ruined it at this point! You can see from the picture above though that the diameter of the silver is getting smaller, working from the bottom up, and therefore gets taller too.

Now that looks more like an egg cup! I love the texture from all those hammer blows but I need to smooth them out.  Next new technique is planishing!  A planishing hammer has a flat face and again, working in a circular motion from the centre of the base, these light taps of the hammer gently smooths the silver, each one overlapping the one before.

I now need to decide on the base, finish smoothing and polishing the silver and it'll be finished!  More next week!